Matte medium for thinning paints so that it turns transparent (very very important).

Some cheapo acrylic paints.

P3 silver paint (can’t remember which one).

The smallest brush I could find for painting details, like eyes and small touch ups. Very very very important!

A spare brush to soak up excess paint pooling in the crevices.

Here’s how I do it:

Slop gesso on the mini, jamming any crevice with it. It won’t look pretty at first. After 40 minutes it’ll start to shrink and conform to the details as it dries. Awesome stuff. Let it cure for 24 hours if you want to be careful.

Dry brush. Start with grey. Then dry brush again with a lighter grey catching the highlights. Then dry brush again either with a near white grey or with white on the top most highlight (you won’t need to do a lot of it).

Mix paint + medium + water OR use a wash. Just slop it on an area that you want to start with. For metals, simply dry brush the highlights, it’ll be enough (I learnt this the hard way after 5 minis. It worked while painting Yuri).

Unfortunately, there’s still no easy way to paint faces and small areas of skin. You still need to base coat, shade, paint eyes and then apply highlight/lipstick/scar/whatever. Except for the eyes and small minute corrections using a 5/0 brush, the rest are painted with a number 2 brush. Primed with an old frayed brush I had lying around somewhere.

There’ll be Yuri, Cenette, Daniella and Claire coming. Can’t wait to start with those in the weekend 🙂